and Missy whimpering and digging her fingers into the other. There’s music playing someplace and a gristmill chugging and grinding grain. My neck’s crooked from my head laying on my shoulder, and my eyelashes stick from the wind and the dirt. I pull them apart and see it’s dark yet. The moon’s gone, but the stars still spatter the black sky.
The train scoots along in a slow, lazy sway, like a mama rocking her baby, too lost in the look of her child to think of the day’s work done or the hard row ahead.
When the train stops, there comes a ruckus of men and women, horses, dogs, wagons, hand trucks. A barker calls out, “Pots, pans, kettles! Salt pork, bacon!”
Another yells, “Good buckets, sharp axes, oilcloth, shovels….”
A man sings “Oh Shenandoah,” and a woman laughs high and long.
No matter that good folk oughta be sleeping at this hour, the noise of people and animals seems to come from everyplace. Noise and noise.
We get off the train and move away from rolling wagons and scrambling horses and find a place on a boardwalk under a coal lamp. Wagons come too close to other wagons and folks holler out. “Watch yerself, thar,” and “Haw, Bess. Haw, Pat. Git up! Git up, now!”
A man yells something in a language I don’t know. A team of loose horses bolts out of the dark and down the street, harnesses flapping. A child screams for its mama.
Missy squeezes my arm so hard I feel the blood swell up in my hand. “Stop that, now. You’re troublin’ me. Ain’t walking all the way to Fort Worth with you hanging on me.” I try to shake her off, but she won’t have it.
A spotted bull trots into the torchlight and moves on by, easy as could be, nobody leading it, nor chasing it, nor minding it, far as I can see. The torch lamp glows off its white spots and the frightful, gray horns long enough a man could lay in them like a hammock. The lamp glow goes down into the middle of the bull’s eye and bounces off and comes at us blue-red, and he snorts out dust and steam.
“This’s a awful place,” I tell Juneau Jane, and I worry Fort Worth might be worse, not better. Texas is bad wild, once you get past the river port. “I’d as soon start out walkin’, and us be gone from here.”
“But, the river is first,” Juneau Jane argues. “We must wait until day, in order that we will know the means by which others cross the water.”
“I guess.” I hate to let her be right, but she is. “Might be, in the morning, we can pay a little to get on a wagon, anyhow.”
We wander here and there, looking for a spot to huddle up. Folks chase us out, if they see us. What looks like three ragged boys, colored and white together, and one addle-headed being led by the hand, ain’t something anybody feels kindly toward. Finally, we go down to the riverbank, where there’s wagon camps, and we push up in some brush, and cower together like three lost pups, and hope nobody bothers us.
Soon’s light comes, we eat a breakfast of hard pilot biscuits out of our pack and the last few bites of salted ham from the crew on the Katie P., and then we hold the poke up overhead and cross the river at the shallows. It ain’t hard to know the way, just walk along with the steady row of wagons fording the river and going west. A line of other folks passes us, traveling the other way, too, aiming for the railhead with their buckboards and farm wagons. Herds of spotted big-horned cattle tramp through, trailed by rough-looking men and boys in wide hats and knee boots. Sometimes, the herds pass for what seems like a hour at a time.
It ain’t midway in the morning before Missy goes to limping in them new shoes from Jefferson. Sweat and road dust makes a plaster on her skin, clinging her shirt to her body. She takes up fussing and tugging at it and working loose the cloth that’s binding her bosom flat.